Westgate Nursing & Rehab Community

With an address in Ironwood, Michigan, Westgate Nursing & Rehab Community is the sole nursing home located in the area. We gave it an overall grade of B-, which is a middle of the pack score. In our view, this facility looks like a good fit for quite a few people. One of the better aspects of this nursing home's report card is its impressive inspection grade, which you can find in the next section.

One of the reasons this turned out to be a decent facility is that it earned a very favorable inspection score. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B+. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple relatively minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home also received a strong short-term care grade. Indeed, we gave it a B in that category, which is one of our more favorable scores. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. We were extremely impressed to find that this facility offers its residents substantially more physical therapist hours than most other nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. This place performed respectably with 45.9 percent of its patients able to return home.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. In calculating a facility's nursing score, we look at the number of hours nurses spend with patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility provided 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This facility fared well in some of the quality measures we looked at. For example, in terms of the number of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided with better nursing care.

The next area we analyzed is long-term care. This nursing home received a grade of B- for the area. For residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. One of the criteria we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.08676 percent of its patients. This place keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 1.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a substantially better hospitalization rate than most nursing homes.